Better Internal Communication for a Healthcare Institution in Argentina

26.10.2016

Softline announces the closure of the email migration project at Hospital Alemán, one of the longest-running healthcare institutions in Argentina. By implementing Office 365 and migrating email accounts to Exchange Online, users are more satisfied and this has significantly improved their productivity which is a benefit to the entire organization. The estimated productivity improvement is 20%.

With over 145 years of history, Hospital Alemán is one of the longest-running healthcare institutions in Argentina. It covers 55 medical specialties and serves 60,000 patients every month staffed by over 2,300 permanent employees and professionals.

“We had noticed our email system –Lotus Notes-was not enough to meet our users’ needs, with limited service availability and capacity, while we had to go at great lengths to run its maintenance and administration. These two factors led us to plan for a change and we had a clear idea in mind from the start that the best option for us was to take these services to “the cloud,” states Diego Waksman, Hospital Alemán CIO.

The first thought was to change only the email platform, which was the most troublesome resource. “We had to administer a whole infrastructure ‘on premise’, take care of the antivirus and manage spam, storage servers… and all of this was duplicated, as we had a redundant architecture. We weighed the option of implementing Gmail, but we finally opted for Microsoft’s communication and collaboration cloud platform”, adds the executive.

At Hospital Alemán we migrated all Lotus Notes-based email accounts to Exchange Online / Outlook accounts using Office 365. This action was met with great approval by the staff, as they are used to working on Office on their desktops, and this integration makes their everyday work easier,” explains Waksman.

The implementation links user accounts with the organization’s directory (Active Directory), which greatly simplifies its administration. “We now leave all of the platform management to Microsoft. This has a positive impact on our area and lets us focus on other kinds of organizational needs, for instance, on the development of a collaboration environment so that medical committees can arrange all of their information and communications on SharePoint portals, where a record of each event can be kept along with their related documents,” adds the CIO.

Assisted by the firm Perception Group, a Microsoft business partner with expertise in tools of this nature, hard work was performed on planning the stages of the project, towards efficient change management. The company also worked on the synchronization of Office 365 with the organization’s Windows Server, in order to cater for the automatic creation of email accounts whenever a new user is entered into the system.

The Enterprise agreement with Office 365 licenses E1 and E3 was managed with Softline. This company, together with Perception Group, provided advice with its Pre-Sales architecture team on the assessment and definition of the kind of licensing which fit best for Hospital Alemán.

“By implementing Office 365 and migrating email accounts to Exchange Online, users are more satisfied and this has significantly improved the way we work in the systems department. In a nutshell, this is a benefit to the entire organization. We have estimated a productivity improvement by 20%,” stated Diego Waksman, Hospital Alemán CIO.

“We no longer receive complaints about spam or virus issues. App integration simplifies every day work and this allows each position to respond faster, which is of great importance in an industry such as healthcare, with patients requiring immediate answers. It is a stable platform and this guarantees operational continuity. We at the IT department have more time now and this means we can do our job in better conditions”, concluded the executive.

Softline is a leading global IT (information technology) solution and service provider focused on emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Americas, South-East Asia, India. Our services include public and private cloud solutions, end-to-end technology solutions, software licensing, hardware products and broad array of associated products.Softline offers a diverse portfolio of cloud computing services such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, virtualization, collaboration, security, mobility through a choice of public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud based on our customer’s needs. We also offer perpetual and subscription licensing for a full range of software products, such as operating systems, virtualization, security, business productivity, creativity, education, CAD and others. Hardware solutions include storage, servers, networking and PCs. In addition, we provide services, such as IT asset management, implementation, consulting, IT outsourcing, technical support, managed services and training.Softline’s 2015 sales approached $800 million with an average sales growth exceeding 30% in the last 10 years. Softline has offices in 30 countries and 80 cities worldwide. With more than 20 years of distinguished history we could rapidly grow, consolidate a unique knowledge base, technology expertise and a business model encompassing all emerging markets.We serve over 60 000 Enterprise and SMB clients, both from private and public sectors. Over 1300 sales representatives, 600 engineers and technical specialists help our customers navigate through the ever-changing complex IT environment. We build long-term relationships with our clients, partners and employees. Softline has partnerships with more than 3000 software and hardware manufacturers and has highest partner status with all our key partners. We provide a unique marketing and sales channel for our partners in all the markets where we operate. Softline is always customer centric and provides brand independent solutions which best serve customer’s needs.